The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason
Enlightenment reason, liberalism, and science
T
he Enlightenment developed those features of the modern world that many now take largely for granted—liberal politics and free markets, scientific progress and technological innovation. All four of those institutions depend upon confidence in the power of reason.Political and economic liberalism depend upon confidence that individuals can run their own lives. One gives political power and economic freedom to individuals only to the extent one thinks they are capable of using it wisely. That confidence in individuals is fundamentally a confidence in the power of reason—reason being the means by which individuals can come to know their world, plan their lives, and interact socially the way that reasonable people do—by trade, discussion, and the force of argument.
Science and technology more obviously depend upon confid-ence in the power of reason. Scientific method is an increasingly refined application of reason to understanding nature. Trusting science’s results cognitively is an act of confidence in reason, as is trusting one’s life to its technological products.
Institutionalizing confidence in the power of reason is the most outstanding achievement of the Enlightenment.
One indication of this is that of the thousands of brilliant and hardworking individuals who made the Enlightenment happen, the three men, all of them English, most often identified as being most influential in making the Enlightenment possible are: Francis Bacon, for his work on empiricism and scientific method; Isaac Newton, for his work on physics; and John Locke, for his work on reason, empiricism, and liberal politics. Confidence in the power of reason underlay all of their achievements. Their analyses and arguments carried the day, and it was the framework that they developed that provided the intellectual basis for every major development in the eighteenth century.
The beginnings of the Counter-Enlightenment
The Enlightenment confidence in reason, however, upon which all progress had been based, had always been philosophically incom-plete and vulnerable. These philosophical weaknesses had emerged clearly by the middle of the eighteenth century, in the skepticism of David Hume’s empiricism and the dead-end reached by traditional rationalism. The perceived vulnerability of Enlightenment reason was one of the major rallying points for an emerging Counter-Enlightenment.1
The era from 1780 to 1815 is one of the defining periods of the modern era. During those thirty-five years, Anglo-American culture
1 See Beck 1969, Berlin 1980, Williams 1999, and Dahlstrom 2000 for the historical and philosophical range of “Counter-Enlightenment” as used here.
and German culture split decisively from each other, one following a broadly Enlightenment program, the other a Counter-Enlighten-ment one.
The Enlightenment had started in England, and it took England from having been a second-rate European power to being a first rate one. The rest of Europe noticed. Especially the French and the Germans noticed. The French were first to pick up on the English Enlightenment and to transform brilliantly their own intellectual culture on the basis of it, before the Rousseauians wrested the Revolution away from the Lockeans and turned it into the chaos of the Terror.
Many Germans, however, had been suspicious of the Enlightenment long before the French Revolution. Some German intellectuals absorbed Enlightenment themes, but most were deeply troubled by its implications for religion, morality, and politics.
Enlightenment reason, the critics charged, undermined traditional religion. The leading Enlightenment thinkers were deists, having abandoned the traditional theistic conception of God.
God was no longer a personal, caring creator—he was now the supreme mathematician who had aeons ago designed the universe in terms of the beautiful equations that Johannes Kepler and Newton had discovered. The deists’ God operated according to logic and mathematics—not will and whim. The deists’ God also seemed to have done his work a long time ago, and to have done it well—meaning he was no longer needed on the scene to operate the machinery of the universe. Deism thus did two things: it turned God into a distant architect, and it accepted a rational epistemo-logy. Both of those features caused major problems for traditional theism.
A distant architect is a far cry from a personal God who is there looking after us or checking up on us day to day—he is not someone we pray to or look to comfort from or fear the wrath of.
The deists’ god is a bloodless abstraction—not a being that is going
to get people fired up in church on Sunday morning and give them a sense of meaning and moral guidance in their lives.
An even more important consequence of deism is the loss of faith. To the extent that reason is the standard, faith loses, and the theists of the eighteenth century knew that. To the extent that reason develops, science develops; and to the extent that science develops, supernaturalistic religious answers to be accepted on faith will be replaced with naturalistic scientific explanations that are rationally compelling. By the middle of the eighteenth century, everyone had spotted that trend and everyone knew where it was headed.
Even worse, from the perspective of the early Counter-Enlightenment thinkers, was the content of the naturalistic answers that science was giving in the eighteenth century. Science’s most successful models then were mechanistic and reductionistic. When applied to human beings, such models posed an obvious threat to the human spirit. What place is there for free will and passion, spontaneity and creativity if the world is governed by mechanism and logic, causality and necessity?
And what about the value consequences? Reason is a faculty of the individual, and respect for reason and individualism had developed together during the Enlightenment. The individual is an end in himself, the Enlightenment thinkers taught, not a slave or servant of others. His happiness is his own to pursue, and by giving him the tools of education, science, and technology he can be set free to set his own goals and to chart his own course in life. But what happens, worried the early Counter-Enlightenment thinkers, to traditional values of community and sacrifice, of duty and connectedness, if individuals are encouraged to calculate rationally their own gain? Will not such rational individualism encourage cold-blooded, short-range, and grasping selfishness? Will it not encourage individuals to reject long-standing traditions and to
sever communal ties, thus creating a non-society of isolated, rootless and restless atoms?
The Enlightenment’s championing of reason and individualism thus confronted the early Counter-Enlightenment thinkers with the specter of a godless, spiritless, passionless, and amoral future.
Horror at that specter was most prevalent among intellectuals in the German states, where the prevailing attitude was hostility toward the Enlightenment. Many drew inspiration from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s collectivist social philosophy. Many drew inspiration from Hume’s attack on reason. And many wanted to reinvigorate the German traditions of faith, duty, and ethnic identity that had been undermined by the Enlightenment’s emphasis upon reason, the pursuit of happiness, and cosmo-politanism. As the Enlightenment grew in power and prestige in England and France, an emerging Counter-Enlightenment gathered its forces in the German states.
Our concern in this chapter and the next is with post-modernism’s attack on reason. Postmodernism emerged as a social force among intellectuals because in the humanities the Counter-Enlightenment defeated the Counter-Enlightenment. The weakness of the Enlightenment account of reason was its fatal flaw. Postmodern-ism’s extreme skepticism, subjectivism, and relativism are the results of a two-centuries-long epistemological battle. That battle is the story of pro-reason intellectuals trying to defend realist accounts of perception, concepts, logic, but gradually giving ground and abandoning the field while the anti-reason intellectuals advanced in the sophistication of their arguments and developed increasingly non-rational alternatives. Postmodernism is the end result of the Counter-Enlightenment attack on reason.
Kant’s skeptical conclusion
Immanuel Kant is the most significant thinker of the Counter-Enlightenment. His philosophy, more than any other thinker’s, buttressed the pre-modern worldview of faith and duty against the inroads of the Enlightenment; and his attack on Enlightenment reason more than anyone else’s opened the door to the nineteenth -century irrationalists and idealist metaphysicians. Kant’s innov-ations in philosophy were thus the beginning of the epistemological route to postmodernism.
Kant is sometimes considered to be an advocate of reason. Kant was in favor of science, it is argued. He emphasized the importance of rational consistency in ethics. He posited regulative principles of reason to guide our thinking, even our thinking about religion. And he resisted the ravings of Johann Hamann and the relativism of Johann Herder. Thus, the argument runs, Kant should be placed in the pantheon of Enlightenment greats.2 That is a mistake.
The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality—or is it not? Is our rational faculty a cognitive function, taking its material from reality, understanding the significance of that material, and using that understanding to guide our actions in reality—or is it not? This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti-reason camps, this is the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant’s question in his Critique of Pure Reason.
Kant was crystal clear about his answer. Reality—real, noumenal reality—is forever closed off to reason, and reason is limited to awareness and understanding of its own subjective products. Reason has “no other purpose than to prescribe its own formal rule for the extension of its empirical employment, and not
2 E.g., Höffe 1994, 1.
any extension beyond all limits of empirical employment.”3 Limited to knowledge of phenomena that it has itself constructed according to its own design, reason cannot know anything outside itself.
Contrary to the “dogmatists” who had for centuries held out hope for knowledge of reality itself, Kant concluded that “[t]he dogmatic solution is therefore not only uncertain, but impossible.”4
Thus Kant, that great champion of reason, asserted that the most important fact about reason is that it is clueless about reality.
Part of Kant’s motivation was religious. He saw the beating that religion had taken at the hands of the Enlightenment thinkers, and he agreed strongly with them that religion cannot be justified by reason. So he realized that we need to decide which has priority—reason or religion. Kant firmly chose religion. This meant that reason had to be put in its proper, subordinate, place. And so, as he stated famously in the Second Preface to the first Critique, “I here therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”5 One purpose of the Critique, accordingly, was to limit severely the scope of reason. By closing noumenal reality off to reason, all rational arguments against the existence of God could be dismissed. If reason could be shown to be limited to the merely phenomenal realm, then the noumenal realm—the realm of religion—would be off limits to reason, and those arguing against religion could be told to be quiet and go away.6
Kant’s problematic from empiricism and rationalism
In addition to his religious concerns, Kant was also grappling with the problems that the empiricists and the rationalists had run into in attempting to develop satisfactory accounts of reason.
3 Kant 1781, A686/B714.
4 Kant 1781, B512/A484.
5 Kant 1781, Bxxx.
6 Kant 1781, Bxxxi.
For all of their differences, the empiricists and rationalists had agreed with the broadly Enlightenment conception of reason—that human reason is a faculty of the individual, that it is competent to know reality objectively, that it is capable of functioning auto-nomously and in accordance with universal principles. Reason so conceived underlay their confidence in science, human dignity, and the perfectibility of human institutions.
Of those five features of reason—objectivity, competence, autonomy, universality, and being an individual faculty—Kant concluded that the sad experience of recent philosophy demon-strated that the most fundamental of them, objectivity, must be abandoned. The failures of empiricism and rationalism had shown that objectivity is impossible.
For reason to be objective, it must have contact with reality.
The most obvious candidate for such direct contact is sense-perception. On realist accounts, the senses give us our most direct contact with reality, and they thereby provide the material that reason then organizes and integrates into concepts, those concepts in turn becoming integrated into propositions and theories.
If, however, the senses give us only internal representations of objects, then an obstacle is erected between reality and reason. If reason is presented with an internal sensory representation of reality, then it is not aware directly of reality; reality then becomes something to be inferred or hoped for beyond a veil of sense-perception.
Two arguments had traditionally generated the conclusion that we are aware only of internal sensory representations. The first was based on the fact that sense-perception is a causal process. Since it is a causal process, the argument ran, it seems that one’s reason comes to be aware of an internal state at the end of the causal process and not of the external object that initiated the process. The senses, unfortunately, get in the way of our consciousness of reality. The second argument was based on the fact that the features of
sense-perception vary from individual to individual and across time for any given individual. One individual sees an object as red while another sees it as gray. An orange tastes sweet—but not after tasting a spoonful of sugar. What then is the real color of the object or the real taste of the orange? It seems that neither can be said to be the real feature. Instead, each sense-perception must be merely a subjective effect, and one’s reason must be aware only of the subjective effect and not the external object.
What both of these arguments have in common is a recognition of the uncontroversial fact that our sense organs have an identity, that they work in specific ways, and that the form in which we experience reality is a function of our sense organs’ identities. And they have in common the crucial and controversial premise that our sense organs’ having an identity means that they become obstacles to direct consciousness of reality. This latter premise was critical for Kant’s analysis.
The empiricists had drawn from this analysis of sense-perception the conclusion that while we must rely on our sense perceptions, we must always be tentative with regard to our confidence in them. From sense-perception we can draw no certain conclusions. The rationalists had drawn the conclusions that sense-experience is useless as a source of significant truths and that for the source of such truths we must look elsewhere.
This brings us to abstract concepts. The empiricists, stressing the experiential source of all of our beliefs, had held that concepts too must be contingent. As based on sense-perception, concepts are two stages removed from reality and so less certain. And as groupings based on our choices, concepts are human artifices, so they and the propositions generated from them can have no necessity or universality ascribed to them.
The rationalists, agreeing that necessary and universal concepts could not be derived from sense-experience—but insisting that we do have necessary and universal knowledge—had concluded that
our concepts must have a source somewhere other than in sense-experience. The problematic implication of this was that if concepts did not have their source in sense-experience, then it was hard to see how they could have any application to the sensory realm.
What these two analyses of concepts had in common is the following hard choice. If we think of concepts as telling us some-thing universal and necessary, then we have to think of them as having nothing to do with the world of sense experience; and if we think of concepts as having something to do with the world of sense experience, then we have to abandon the idea of knowing any real universal and necessary truths. In other words, experience and necessity have nothing to do with each other. This premise too was critical for Kant’s analysis.
The rationalists and the empiricists had jointly struck a blow to the Enlightenment confidence in reason. Reason works with concepts. But now we were to accept either that reason’s concepts have little to do with the world of sense experience—in which case, science’s conception of itself as generating universal and necessary truths about the world of sense-experience was in big trouble—or we were to accept that reason’s concepts are merely provisional and contingent groupings of sense-experiences—in which case science’s conception of itself as generating universal and necessary truths about the world of sense-experience was in big trouble.
Thus, by the time of Kant, the Enlightenment philosophers’
account of reason was faltering on two counts. Given their analysis of sense-perception, reason seemed cut off from direct access to reality. And given their analysis of concepts, reason seemed either irrelevant to reality or limited to merely contingent truths.
Kant’s significance in the history of philosophy is that he absorbed the lessons of the rationalists and empiricists and, agree-ing with the central assumptions of both sides, transformed radically the terms of the relationship between reason and reality.
Kant’s essential argument
Kant began by identifying a premise common to both empiricists and rationalists. They had assumed that knowledge must be objective. That is, they took for granted that the object of knowledge sets the terms and that therefore it was up to the subject to identify the object on the object’s terms. In other words, the empiricists and the rationalists were realists: they believed that reality is what it is independently of consciousness, and that the purpose of conscious-ness is to come to an awareconscious-ness of reality as it is. In Kant’s terms, they assumed that the subject is to conform to object.7 Kant then noted that the realist/objectivist assumption had led repeatedly to failure, and—more strikingly—that it must necessarily lead to failure.
To demonstrate this, Kant proposed a dilemma for all analyses of knowledge. The first premise of the dilemma is given at the beginning of the Transcendental Deduction. Here Kant states that knowledge of objects can come to be in only one of two ways.
To demonstrate this, Kant proposed a dilemma for all analyses of knowledge. The first premise of the dilemma is given at the beginning of the Transcendental Deduction. Here Kant states that knowledge of objects can come to be in only one of two ways.